Author: Laura Byrne

The Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution, recognising the equal right to life of the unborn and the mother, was passed by referendum in 1983 after a contentious campaign. While abortion had always been illegal in the Republic of Ireland, the amendment meant that any future legislation could only permit abortion in Ireland in limited circumstances, where the life of the mother was at risk. The amendment has proven to be one of the most controversial Read more…

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg testified in April before a joint hearing in Congress in the US, defending his company’s use of data, in the wake of a recent scandal. It had emerged that a private consulting firm used personal information from more than 50 million Facebook profiles without permission to build a system that could target US voters with political advertisements. The Cambridge Analytica scandal brought up a lot of questions about how much information we share with social Read more…